General and domain-specific influence of prior knowledge on setting of goals and content use in museum websites

This article explores the influence of prior knowledge on the setting of goals and use of content in museum website visits. Goal setting is a crucial process in organizing the activities of surfers in open environments, such as museum websites, where surfers faced ill-defined tasks. To this end, 12 graduate students were asked to surf through two museum websites in different domains (anthropology and natural sciences). Half of the participants had robust background in anthropology. Within each of these groups, half of the students had spent more than four years in graduate school, while the other half were first year students. Visited pages and concurrent comments were recorded, coded and analyzed. Results showed that domain specific knowledge influences goal setting process. Visitors with high domain knowledge tended to set larger and more consistent goal structures than first year students. Results showed also that general previous knowledge influences content use. Surfers with higher general skills tended to elaborate more on content and use more intensively the information available at the websites.